Trivia / Papers, Please

• Follow the Leader: There have been some notable examples that emulate the successful formula of Papers, Please.
  • Apocashop
  • Packets, Please!
  • Not Tonight
  • Not for Broadcast
• Inspiration for the Work: According to this interview, this game is largely inspired by developer Lucas Pope's own experience travelling around the world, and that a significant chunk of it was spent at border control, watching immigration officers manage paperwork. This is largely what informed Papers, Please's own deskwork-shuffling gameplay loop.
• Milestone Celebration: The game got an online demake called LCD, Please for its 10 year anniversary.
• Referenced by...: Has its own page here.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • While you get the option to upgrade apartments as the game goes on, you can only upgrade to class-5 at best; upgrades increase your rent while decreasing the cost of heating (it's generally agreed that the con of the former outweighs the pro of the latter). Many people insist on there being hidden bonuses, or that you can upgrade further; neither are true, despite some people claiming to have reached a class-1 apartment (and often stating it comes with free heat and food, but a ludicrously high rent).
  • There is a rumored beta country called Skoatia. It is merely a fanwork.
• What Could Have Been: Several features were cut over the course of game development.
  • The player would have also had to inspect luggage and baggage for weapons and contraband, with goods they were trying to bring in requiring a customs permit. This was combined with the body scan feature in the final game.
  • Entrants would have sometimes threatened the player with a gun, forcing the player to close the shutter or get their gun out. This was cut, though the shutter feature was kept in (mostly for atmospheric purposes, since it is redundant in the final game).
  • The seals on the paperwork originally had another layer of complexity in the form of a watermark that only a special UV light could reveal. This was cut due to lack of time to implement the feature.
  • Originally, the nude photos from searches would have been kept in the documents confiscation drawer. At the end of the day the player was supposed to destroy them, but you had the choice to sell them on the black market as cheap porn. This feature was cut as it would have required introducing the confiscation drawer long before the plot required it, complicating the early game and diluting the impact of the ability to confiscate passports when it was introduced.
  • The game files contain a few Dummied Out unused rules: at various points during the game, the Inspector would have been required to detain or fingerprint all Kolechians, reject all foreigners under the age of 18, reject all foreign military, and a maximum visit time of 14 days.
  • The MoA teletype that gives out citations would have originally been an actual supervisor in the booth with the player. Sometimes the supervisor would not be paying attention, giving the player the chance to let entrants with incorrect paperwork through. There would have also been a subplot where EZIC managed to replace the supervisor with one of their agents, requiring the player to ignore the government rulebook and work to a second, secret set of EZIC rules instead. The supervisor was cut because it made the Ministry of Admission less of an Orwellian overlord and more of an everyday bureaucracy that can be easily infiltrated, and also because the opportunity to just wait until the supervisor wasn't looking greatly weakened the game.
  • The "Escape to Obristan" ending would have originally involved a minigame where the player had to give the correct documents in the correct order and a small bribe (too small and he denies you, too large and he arrests you). This was cut due to lack of time, the developer feeling it was unfair to add one more fail condition so late in the game, and giving the wrong impression that that ending was more "correct" than the others.
  • Originally, the "denial" stamp could only be given once the player had found a discrepancy in the entrant's paperwork. This was felt to make it feel like less of a simulation and more of a game; the "reason for denial" stamp was added to compensate.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: The game, during its beta stage, allowed people to submit their names to be used for the randomly-generated immigrants. Well, it was supposed to be their names. Many submissions had to be removed because some wise guys tried to abuse it to sneak in names of celebrities, names of characters in other media, or obscene puns. And in one case, this was particularly unfortunate - one of the submitted names was Anita Sarkeesian, the host of Feminist Frequency...and the creator unknowingly used it for a prostitute.
• Word of God: Which ending is canon? According to the creator, "They're all canon. :)"

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